Shinawatras leading farmers over the cliff

your say February 19, 2014 00:00

It takes immense courage to admit that one is wrong and to seek to rectify one's mistake rather than to save face at others' cost.

Thaksin/Yingluck should find that courage before they lead more of their ardent followers over the financial cliff. Those who believed in Thaksin’s rice plan are in real trouble, as the 11 suicides to date attest.

The rice plan is clearly financially unsustainable. That’s why Government Savings Bank president Worawit Chailimpamontri emphatically denied that GSB’s lending Bt20 billion to BAAC was to support the plan, before admitting the next day that at least Bt5 billion was for precisely that purpose. When GSB’s credit line for that plan is exhausted, dear reader, will your bank be squeezed next?

Instead of putting our banking system at risk, Thaksin/Yingluck should about-face, pay farmers off in instalments and revise the plan, focusing on those too poor to grow enough to sell, seeking to make them self-supporting in, say, five years.